Thursday, 26 January 2012

‘He is a w**ker
of the highest order. I am not at all sorry that the Indians have asked him to
f**k off,’ the man delivered his verdict, chomping on the deep fried KFC
chicken wings.

Let’s
assume that the man was an Asian Muslim, liberal enough to masticate on non-halal meat at the KFC (powered down his
gullet by the 400 calories of milkshake which goes by some silly name I can
neither pronounce nor spell) but not liberal enough to feel even a smidgen of
sympathy for the w**ker.

Let’s also
assume that the man is of Pakistani descent, a country generally considered to
be the arch enemy of India. If you think the Brits and the French dislike
each other, that is nothing compared to the animosity between
these two countries.

In usual circumstance
a Pakistani can be trusted to tie a rock round his neck and lie down at the
bottom of Thames than say anything that might have an outside chance of being
construed as praise for his country’s giant neighbour.

But not on
this occasion. The Pakistani (how I came to be sharing a table with him at the KFC is an interesting story, but not for this post) attacking the KFC zinger
meal with the gusto of a Taliban attacking a US post in Vaziristan approved
wholeheartedly that the man addicted to solitary sexual pleasure was asked to find sex elsewhere by the Indians.

The w**ker
is Salman Rushdie, who was supposed to appear at a literary festival in India,
but in the end did not because the Muslims clerics went apeshit over him
speaking at the festival, and the organizers chickened out.

Actually,
that is not true strictly speaking. The organizers—William Dalrymple and Sanjoy
Roy—wanted Rushdie very much to attend. Indeed, at the first whiff of the
trouble—when a cleric from a Muslim seminary in India went public demanding
Rushdie not be invited—Dalrymple went into the kind of laudatory hyper-drive last heard when Barak Obama was elected as the US president (Yes we can!).

I can’t help feeling that it was a strategy doomed
to fail.

Look at it
this way. Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, and incurred the
wrath of ‘tens of millions of Muslims’, according to the Muslim cleric in India
(and that is just Indian Muslims). He announced that Rushdie (himself a Muslim
by birth) had insulted Islam and the Muslims will never forgive him.

Do you see?
The clue is in the adverb ‘never’. The cleric said the Muslims will not forgive
Rushdie. Not now; not ever. They will not forgive him on any occasion. Absolutely
not. Don’t even mention the word forgiveness: in no way the Muslims will
forgive Rushdie. Absolutely not. Don’t bother, because we won’t bother. Don’t
even mention it. We would rather swim naked in the Ganges with paper-cuts on our nipples than forgive Rushdie. We would rather eat our own snot than
forgive Rushdie.

And what
does Dalrymple do? He calls Rushdie one of the greatest Muslims to have come
out of India who had contributed to humanity more than Gandhi. Therefore—so went
Dalrymple’s argument—Muslims should welcome Rushdie with open arms and press
him to their metaphorical armpits.

Not a
clever thing to do, if you ask me.

Perhaps
Dalrymple was hoping to appeal to the better nature of the Muslim cleric. Therein
lay his second mistake: these guys don’t have one.

Since it
was not Dalrymple’s intention to piss off the Muslim cleric who was already
hopping mad that Rushdie was invited for the festival, I can only assume that
the man is extraordinarily naive. How
did he think the cleric was going to respond to his heart-wrenching appeal? He
(the cleric) was hardly going to say, ‘I am so sorry! What was I thinking? Of
course! Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest Muslim figures to have emerged
out of the Indian Muslim community. And there
I was; thinking the man is an infidel who has insulted our prophet and should
be punished by stoning to death (followed by chopping of the hand that wrote
the blasphemous novel). You have opened my eyes, sir! I can’t thank you enough!
I shall immediately send a telegram of apology to Mr. Rushdie after which I
shall start organizing a welcome party for him that will include my four wives and twelve children.’ Not very likely.

I have to
sadly conclude that Dalrymple no more understand the minds of religious zealots
than I understand the technicality of the surgery that created Eve from Adam’s
ribs.

Anyway,
Rushdie, to begin with, was pretty gung ho about it. He declared that he was
going to attend the festival; he wasn’t banned from travelling to India; and
travel to India he would. And the cleric of the Islamic seminary could put it
in his hookah and smoke it.

Rushdie’s
intrepid announcement had a number of consequences.

Firstly the Muslim cleric
upped his ante, and he was joined in his condemnation of Rushdie by other
clerics (who probably wouldn't be able to pick out literature from an identity parade).

Secondly, a number of politicians (mostly local) from the two major political
parties in India—the Congress and the right-of-the-centre BJP— opened their
gobs and came out in support of the Muslim cleric. They were not as loud (and
ridiculous) as the cleric, but opined that it was ‘inappropriate’ for Rushdie
to come to the festival in the circumstances.

What are
the circumstances?

If you
thought the circumstances are related to the ‘hurt Muslim sentiments’, you
could not be further from truth.

The
circumstances, reported in The Guardian
and The Telegraph are that several
states in the Indian federation are poised for key provincial elections; and in
several constituencies, Muslims form significant minorities and can influence
the outcome of the election if they choose to vote en mass for one or the other
party. That is the reasons the politicians thought it was ‘inappropriate’ of
Rushdie to visit India; because neither Congress nor BJP can afford to piss
them off. What the politicians meant was that it was inconsiderate
of Rushdie to make matters awkward for them.

In the past
few years (again, according to reports in the Western newspapers) Rushdie, who
is of Indian descent, has visited the country of his birth on many occasions.
He has even visited Jaipur, the city where the literary festival was being
held. Nobody cared then. We didn’t hear the Muslim cleric howling in protest
then, nor did the Indian politicians weighed in with their ill-advised remarks.

There is,
therefore, prima facie case to consider that the reason the Muslim cleric was confident
his voice would be heard was because the elections are round the corner. That is democracy Indian
style, I guess.

The
politicians were no doubt further inconvenienced by Rushdie’s refusal to budge.
India being an open, democratic etcetera etcetera country, they could not
prevent Rushdie from travelling to India, and appearing at the festival if he
so wished.

So the
police stepped in. Rushdie was informed—either directly or indirectly—by the
intelligence agencies that there was a threat to his life if he appeared at the
festival; the agencies had obtained information that paid assassins from the
Mumbai Muslim underworld would be boarding trains for Jaipur to kill him, if he turned up at the festival.

In a statement read out on Rushdie’s behalf, he announced that while he had some
doubts as to the accuracy of the intelligence, he had decided to withdraw from
the festival, as he thought it would be irresponsible of him to come to the
festival in these circumstances.

Circumstances. They had changed. Again. But had they? Really? The rumours
started floating in the festival venue that this was false intelligence; that
the Mumbai underworld Dons had more worthwhile hings to do (smuggle in gold, diamonds,
Nepali prostitutes) than send assassins to kill an author who managed to
survive Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa.

Salman
Rushdie immediately smelt a rat; not just rat—he also smelt a chipmunk, a
squirrel, a hamster, a jerboa and a whole raft of rodents. He figured out that there was no plot to
kill him. It was an attempt, no doubt engineered by the cynical Indian
politicians at whose beck and call the Indian police apparently are, to keep
him away from the festival and avoid pissing of Muslims voters.

It was now
Rushdie’s turn to feel pissed off. Julius Caesar probably felt less betrayed
when Brutus plunged the kitchen-knife between his shoulder blades.

Rushdie announced on twitter, from America (this great figure from the Indian Muslim
community whom the British taxpayers spent millions to protect after Khomeini’s
fatwa, embraced American nationality a
few years ago, citing that Britain was boring; he was right, but truth still hurts):

‘I have investigated and believe that I was
indeed lied to. I am outraged and very angry.’

(I do not
know what ‘investigation’ Rushdie carried out into the alleged Mumbai
underworld plot to assassinate him, but he is a clever man. I am sure that he
quickly figured out that the assassins, if they valued their own lives, would
not have dared to travel on the Indian trains, as they would have been suffocated (or
crushed) to death themselves before the train reached Jaipur. Rushdie must die,
but not if they end up dying too.)

The
fire-breathing Muslim clerics were not embarrassed that their country faced severe criticism in The Guardian and The Telegraph over the whole affair. They did not
beat about the bush. They did not hide behind namby-pamby euphemisms we Brits
are so good at. As one cleric told one of the Indian television channels, the
matter was simple: Rushdie had written a book insulting Islam. (No, he had not
read it; he would not pollute his eyes by reading the infidel’s book; also he
couldn’t read English). The man had shown or expressed no remorse for his
heinous crime. And the Muslims were not going to forgive him. He was happy that
Rushdie was not coming to the festival. Allah be praised!

There were
a couple of final twists to the story. The British novelist (of Indian descent)
Hari Kunzru and another Indian novelist decided to read aloud excerpts from TheSatanic Verses in the festival (presumably to show solidarity to
Rushdie). Kunzru is a good writer (his debut novel, The Impressionist, was
very impressive, as was My Revolutions), but he really must
desist from such stunts. In any case both the novelists were prevented from
reading aloud from the novel by the organizers, which peeved Salman further and
he demanded explanation. (The explanation was: The Satanic Verses
remains banned in India and reading from the novel probably constitutes a crime
in that country.) I think the organizers did Kunzru a favour. Spending a nice
weekend in the air-conditioned comforts of the hotel in which the festival was
held is one thing, but I don’t think Kunzru would have found the hospitality of Indian jails
quite up to the same standards.

The
organizers then arranged a video-link conference at the venue with Rushdie.
That too had to be cancelled at the last minute. Once again, the Indian police
were very canny. They knew that they could not stop the organizers from holding the
video conference. So they prevailed upon the owner of the hotel to withdraw
permission to the conference (telling him that there might be violence in the
hotel and thousands might riot on the streets) which left William Dalrymple
feeling ‘personally disgraced’.

What actually
happened was about 50 youths (presumably Muslim) entered the venue and started
intimidating people. The organizers could not explain how the men managed to
breach the security code. The police said they let the men in because they had
the requisite delegate passes. Make of that what you will.

The police
chief of Jaipur was remarkably unabashed about it. ‘In view of the simmering resentment
in the city [against Rushdie], I feared there would be problems in the festival
and riots outside, so I advised the owner to cancel the video broadcast,’ he said.

What does all
this mean for the world’s largest democracy? On the face of it, it is spectacularly
cringeworthy. It is not an edifying spectacle when cynical politicians with
eyes on the votes bow down to religious extremism. Rushdie wasted no time in
castigating Indian politicians and Muslim religious leaders. Said Rushdie:

‘Currently the people who
claim to be speaking for India's Muslims are either not the true leaders, or
they are certainly extremely bad leaders. And the fact that the political
system plays with those leaders, wants to placate them, and curry favour with them,
that of course is the fault of the political system.’

Rushdie
probably has a point. This is no doubt sociological experts would call as the
paradox of modern India. On the one hand the country is poised to become one of
the economic giants in the coming decades, with a proportion of its citizens—certainly
the educated and the well off classes—having the same sensibilities and values
of Western civilizations; on the other hand are religious leaders (and, by
the looks of it, some politicians) who are living in medieval times.

That said
Rushdie is a tad harsh on the country of his birth. Rushdie might have been
born and lived in India when he was young, but it was not India but Britain
that intellectually nourished him. In his thinking Rushdie is a Westerner, and
(perhaps understandably) takes for granted certain values like freedom of
speech in a supposedly open, democratic and secular country. The thing is (I
know, I know; it is a cliché) India is at once an ancient civilization and a very young
country. India as we know it today has existed for only sixty years, after the
British left. What is happening is India trying to squeeze in sixty
years what took centuries in Europe. Nobody promised the ride wouldn’t be
bumpy.

Ultimately,
I believe, the middle classes—the intellectual guardians of any culture—will determine
which way India will go. There are almost 400 millions of them, and growing.
Which suggests there is hope.

As
for Rushdie, I think he should offer unhesitating apology to the Muslim world.
He has to accept that there are parts of the world where folk are not as laid
back about religion as some of us are in Britain. Where—even in democracies
such as India— the Western concept of freedom to say offensive things is not
readily appreciated. He might not have intended to cause offence, but cause
offence he did. Why not accept with humility that you might have inadvertently offended
a culture, and apologize with good grace?

Salman Rushdie is a great writer, who has written many excellent novels. It would be a shame if he is forever linked with the controversy surrounding one of the novels (which is also an excellent novel).

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

The Vice Chancellor of the Darul Uloom
seminary in Deoband is annoyed. He (I am assuming the vice chancellor is a man)
is cheesed off. He is about as happy as Gordon Brown was on the May 2010
election day.

Why is the vice chancellor of the Darul
Uloom Seminary in Deoband peeved? What is making him more sore than bleeding
haemorrhoids? What has caused him to be as comradely as a starving grizzly bear
that can’t get to the bee-hive at the top of the branch?

I can clarify.

The vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom
seminary is in a towering rage (and we are talking at least forty stories here)
because the infidel is coming to town.

I think more clarification is in order at
this stage.

The first question requiring an answer is:
where in Allah’s name is Darul Uloom seminary? That is easy. The answer, given
in the first line of this post, is: Deoband.

The next question: where in the name of
Mohammad is Deoband? I can answer this, too. Deoband is a town (I am assuming
it is a town seeing as it has a seminary which boasts of a vice chancellor,
although calling a cleric in a seminary a vice-chancellor is a bit like a
chiropractor calling himself a doctor) in India.

Where in India, I hear you asking, is
Deoband? There you have got me. I don’t have a f**king clue. But wherever it
is, the infidel would be well advised to steer clear of it. Because he is not
welcome there.

The infidel in question is Salman Rushdie,
the Booker Prize winning author of Midnight’s Children, who, in 1988,
wrote a novel entitled The Satanic Verses, which incurred
the wrath of the then supreme leader of the Islamic republic of Iran, the AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini. Khomeini, in his infinite wisdom, decreed that Rushdie had
insulted the prophet and any punishment short of execution was too kind. And
Khomeini was not in a mood to show mercy to the insulter of the prophet (and by
extension Islam). He took out a fatwa
against Rushdie which gave permission for the infidel to be killed wherever he
(the infidel) was.

The densely written The Satanic Verses, which
I doubt would otherwise have been heard of, let alone read, in the Muslim
world, achieved instant notoriety following Khomeini’s fatwa. Rushdie went into hiding and had to stay hidden for several
years (the British taxpayers’ money was well spent in protecting him).

The Satanic Verses was
banned in many countries, most of them Islamic.

India was one of the first countries to ban
The
Satanic Verses. The book is still officially banned in India, although,
according to an Indian friend of mine, for a while after Khomeini’s fatwa the novel was one book that was
smuggled the most into the country (until the Indians realised that it was
unreadable).

(As an aside, I read somewhere that The
Satanic Verses has sold more copies than Midnight’s Children. It
is Rushdie’s most commercially successful novel to-date, all thanks to
Khomeini’s fatwa, although I doubt
that that was Khomeini’s intention when he took out the fatwa.)

Salman Rushdie is of Indian descent (he was
born and brought up in Mumbai, India), and he was said to be deeply hurt that
the country of his origin banned the book even before it was banned in some of
the Islamic countries.

India, of course, is not an Islamic
country. It is a secular, democratic country. However, it has a sizeable Muslim
population. Muslims form almost 14% of India’s population (more than 100
millions). One guesses that the Indian authorities were not overtly keen to
piss off the already pissed off Muslim population by allowing the novel to
become freely available.

In due course Rushdie came out of hiding. I
am not exactly sure, but I think after Khomeini’s death (I hope he is enjoying
the delights of the paradise after leading a life of piety) the Iranian government
found some sort of face-saving formula, managing, in the process, the kind of
intellectual contortions that would have British politicians nodding with
approval; and essentially said that they were taking back Khomeini’s fatwa (and were happy to wait, instead,
for the infidel to be struck by the full wrath of Allah).

India might have banned The
Satanic Verses, but it has not banned Rushdie from travelling to India.

Rushdie is invited to attend a literary
festival that will be held in Jaipur, Rajasthan later this month. It is this invitation that has raised the
hackles of the vice-chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary.

Rushdie is not the only prominent writer
(in the Western hemisphere) who will be in attendance. Other prominent authors
attending this literary festival include the Pulitzer Award winning American
novelist, Annie Proloux; the 1991 Booker Winner Ben Okri (we shall ignore for
the moment that Okri has written little of consequence since his Booker win
twenty years ago); the British playwright David Hare; and Richard Dawkins. The
last name is interesting. I have not read Richard Dawkins (he bores me with his
constant anti-God, anti-religions hectoring), but I should hazard a guess that
Dawkin’s views about all religions, God, and figures—historical and current
that claimed to have had a special relationship with or an exclusive channel of
communication with the Supreme being—are likely to be even more sceptical than
those expressed in one section of The Satanic Verses.

(I should briefly clarify my position on
God and religion, here. Having given the matter considerable thought over the
years, I have decided to hedge my bets and have settled on a position of agnosticism.
It is like this: if you spend all your life believing that God exists, that
there is afterlife, and that you would be answerable for your deeds in this
life after your death; and if God does not exist, if there is no afterlife,
what have you got to lose? You die, and there is nothing after that. On the
other hand, if you spend all your life bad-mouthing God, and if he does exist,
then, upon your demise, you are going to meet a Supreme Being that is more f**ked
off than the vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, India.)

So, this is the situation. There is a
literary festival in India, to which Salman Rushdie is invited. The vice
chancellor of a Muslim seminary in India is upset about it. He does not think
that the infidel who has insulted the great religion and its founder should be
invited in any official capacity to India.

I have no reason to believe that the vice
chancellor is an unwise man. I do not know whether he has actually read The
Satanic Verses. If he has never left India, he would not—at any rate,
should not—have read the offending novel, which is banned in that country. (May
be he travelled to the UK with the specific aim of reading the novel and
deciding for himself whether Rushdie offended the Muslim sentiments; or perhaps
he was content to put his faith in the sound judgment of the late Ayatollah of
Iran and considered The Satanic Verses blasphemous even if he has not read the novel
himself. It does not matter. You have a right to feel offended about or have
view against something you have no personal experience of. I am totally against
greenhouse gases; I think it is bad news for the planet. I also believe that
America, China, and India, in that order, are currently the worst offenders;
and the politicians—power-makers in case of China—in their short-sightedness
are making our planet a more dangerous place. Believe me, I hold very strong
view on the matter; I have seriously considered going on marches (before
rejecting it in favour of shouting abuses at the TV screen at the Ten o’clock BBC
news). I could not explain to you, though, what exactly greenhouse gases are
and in what way they are endangering the planet. But that does not stop me from
having very strong views on the subject.) The point is: people can have very
strong views on matters they know little about, or, in some cases, are even
misinformed about. That is life. Therefore, while it is possible that a vast majority of the tens
of millions in the Islamic world who feel deeply offended by the alleged
anti-Islamic views of Rushdie in The Satanic Verses has not actually read the novel,that does not
make the sentiments ersatz in my view.
I would rather they read The Satanic Verses and decide for
themselves whether or not Rushdie offended Islam. (May be some of them did and
feel, after reading the novel that
Rushdie insulted their religion. I have known a few educated Muslims over the
years and with some of them, whom I became friendly with, I tried to discuss
The Rushdie issue. Not a single one of them admitted to have read The
Satanic Verses. None of them called Rushdie an infidel, either, I
should point out; or wished him a horrible death. There was, if anything, a marked reluctance to discuss this on their part,
which I suspected was because they did hold strong views on the matter. But
that is my guess.) I could also go on the Net and find out more about it so
that I can have an informed opinion on the matter; but I can’t be bothered.

So what is the vice chancellor of the Darul
Uloom seminary in Deoband saying? According to the article in The Daily
Telegraph, the vice chancellor, who goes by the impressive name of
Maulana Abul Qasim Nomeni, is calling upon

‘the Muslim organizations of the country [India]
to mount pressure on the centre to withdraw the visa and prevent him [Rushdie] visiting
India where [tens of millions] community members still feel hurt owing to the
anti-Islamic remarks in his writings The Muslims cannot pardon him at any
cost.’

Abul Qasim
Nomeni, it would be fair to say, is not feeling particularly benevolent towards
Rushdie, which, one might say, is only to be expected of a man whose name
rhymes with Khomeini. He is (or thinks he is) speaking on behalf of tens of
millions of community members (Muslims), who, he assures us, are still hurt
over the anti-Islamic remarks in Rushdie’s writings. (Interesting that Maulana
does not actually mention The Satanic Verses; instead he uses
the generic term ‘writings’. Does this mean that Rushdie has made remarks that
can be construed as anti-Islamic in his other writings?—I have read half a
dozen Rushdie novels and The Satanic Verses is the only one
which can be viewed as anti-Islamic. Or is it the case that the pious Maulana
can’t bring himself to even utter the name of the infidel’s novel?)

The headline
under which The Daily Telegraph chose to publish the article is also interesting.
The headline is:

Maybe I am
missing something, or The Daily Telegraph has chosen to
keep hidden a vital piece of information from its readers.

What Abul Qasim
Nomeni is, according to the Telegraph’s own article, asking is:
(a) the writer’s centre withdraw invitation to Rushdie, and / or (b) withdraw
the visa to Rushdie so that he cannot travel to India. (The second calling is
presumably to Indian authorities; I wouldn’t have thought that the writer’s
centre that has organized the festival would have any say in the matter.)

That hardly qualifies
as a threat of Muslim reprisal. The vice chancellor is not exhorting the
‘community members’ to tie explosive to their genitals and blow themselves up
in the festival. He is encouraging the community members to put pressure on the
Indian government to withdraw Rushdie’s visa. One might disagree with the vice
chancellor; one might feel that his views are not adequately informed; but one
can hardly take an issue with his methods.

In recent years,
the UK has banned a number of organizations, books and pamphlets, which the
government (read security agencies) feels is inimical to the fabric of the
society; the government has also banned individuals from entering the country.
The vice chancellor Nomeni wants a ban on Rushdie visiting his country. He is
entitled to his views, however misguided we think they are, and, in a free
country, he has every right to voice them. India is a country with free speech;
it is not country with free visiting rights.

The worry, of
course, is that while the learned vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom university
might not be espousing violent methods to get the message across, his clarion
call might just be the kind of encouragement some radical ‘community members’—
who have come to the conclusion that the world does not change through somebody
asking nicely and whose chief mode of communication, therefore, is hand-made
bombs—do not need.

Let’s go back to
India’s banning of The Satanic Verses. I don’t know why India banned the book, but
I can guess. The Indian politicians probably concluded that (a) the Muslim
sentiments were indeed hurt by the novel, and (b) publishing of the book might
lead to law and order problems. And they decided that the best way to deal with
the situation and prevent it from escalating further was to ban the book.

The Satanic Verses was not the first, and won’t be the last,
book to be banned. The list of novels banned in the UK and America in the
twentieth century, because they fell foul, in some way or the other, of the
powers that be, is longer than a lemur’s tail.

That does not
make the banning of The Satanic Verses right, mind, in my view; however, as the
cliché goes, time is the best leveler, and decisions which either make perfect
contextual sense or serve some or the other expediency (political, cultural
etcetera), will look, with the passage of time, cynical, dishonest and wrong.

Is Abul Qasim
Nomeni, the vice chancellor of Darul Uloom seminary, a fundamentalist Muslim?
He might be, or he might not be. All I can say is Islam is not the only
religion which generates fundamentalists. Christianity has its own brand of
religious headcases. Like the organization in Russia which wants the Bhagvad
Geeta (sacred book of Hindus) to be banned in Russia because it is
anti-Christian, apparently. Or the American nutter who was going to burn the
Koran. There is no dearth of Christian Evangelists who are bat-shit mental and
go into proselytizing over-drive, spreading the true message of Christmas (and
generally being a pain in the neck) every December. True, in recent years, the
Christian fundamentalists have not been involved in acts of spectacular
violence; but that might be because Christian lands have not been invaded by
Muslim armies.

However, let’s
get back to the Rushdie affair. In recent years, Rushdie is the second author
that I know of who has invited disapprobation for his alleged anti-Islamic
views. In 2010, V.S. Naipaul withdrew from giving the inaugural speech for the
European Writers’ Parliament, in Turkey, after a slew of Turkish writers and
journalists, criticized the decision to invite Naipaul, who, according to them,
was anti-Islamic. (Commented on this blog.)

Rushdie—bless
him!—has so far shown no inclination to withdraw. Instead he has given out a
statement (bold or belligerent, take your pick) to the effect that he fully
intends to attend the festival, and because he is of Indian origin he does not even
need a visa to visit India.

Rushdie, in the
words of William Darlymple, the organizer of the Jaipur Literary Festival, has
made a major ‘contribution to multiculturalism, pluralism and co-existence.’ He
is (Dalrymple, again) ‘one of the greatest artists India has created’. He is
also (Dalrymple hasn’t finished yet) ‘one of the greatest figures to come out
of Indian Muslim community.’

This is high
praise indeed. I do not know about Rushdie’s contribution to all the isms
Dalrymple is talking about; neither do I possess knowledge of great Muslim
figures that have come out of the Indian Muslim community (I am happy to take
Dalrymple’s word for it). What I do know (having read six of his novels) is
Rushdie is a superb writer. Three cheers for Rushdie.

Friday, 13 January 2012

As
I have written in the past on this blog, I am not a car enthusiast and I am not
in the habit of watching, regularly at any rate, car-related programmes;
certainly not when they are fronted by not very good looking middle aged men.
(Come to think of it, I wouldn’t watch them even when they are presented by good
looking blokes.)

Therefore
I did not watch the Top Gear—India Special that was aired on the BBC, twice, during the Christmas
period.

Top Gear,
of course, is a hugely popular (in the UK) programme on cars,
presented by three middle-aged men: one—tall with a huge belly, big teeth, and
hair that look from a distance like
islands of grey broccoli (Jeremy Clarkson); another—of average height,
also parading a beer belly and hair that look as if he blow dries them with the
propeller of a Jet-plane, which conspire to have the net effect of making him look
as though he woke up in a ditch (James May); and a third one, who is tiny but
is not fat—in fact he is nothing; he is like a sack half-filled with sticks—and
has limp hair that look as if they resist any attempts at styling (Hammond; I
can’t remember his first name).

Jeremy Clarkson (This is what happens when you live on a diet of potato fat and lager)

James May (Where is my absinthe?)

Hammond (Am I a t**t?)

However,
I should hazard a guess that the viewership of this vastly popular programme on
the BBC (mostly comprising men, I should guess) is not attracted to it because of the stunning
good looks of these three men. They watch it because—difficult as it is for me
to believe it—they are utterly fascinated by cars. I don’t get it. I am constitutionally
unable to appreciate comments—however witty they are—on the hydraulic functions
of the engines or the horsepower (or whatever it is called); they don’t
interest me..

The
quasi-technical jibber-jabber on these programmes is, as far as I am concerned,
a language spoken on Jupiter, a planet I have no intention of visiting. Thus when
Clarkson or May or Hammond circles round a car in the studio (with a simpering crowd
of mostly men and a few women (with heads like racing mullets) in the
background—the Room Intelligent Quotient, you would imagine, being slightly
above that of farmyard animals), mouthing things like ‘2.0-litre, 16 valves
turbocharged engine’ with the air that they are revealing the secret of the
elixir of life, I do not share their awe. Or, when Clarkson goes all dewy eyed
about some car, say, Lancia, that went out of production in the last century (probably because it was crap
and there was no demand for it), or describes some long-since extinct
Half-Estate-Half-Sport-Coupe as drop dead gorgeous, I cannot share his sentimental nostalgia. Or, when he
describes wrathfully some car as the most unreliable pile of over-rated rubbish
on wheels, the only emotion I experience is amazement that anyone can froth at
mouth about a car he is getting to test-drive for free; it is not as if he has
spent his undeservedly earned money on it. And with the best will in the world
I can’t get myself to feel ecstatic about pointless information such as 0 to 60
miles in 5 seconds or whatever. What is the use of this information? It is not
as if you would be able to put this function to use in your day-to-day life. Why
would you want to go from 0 to 60 in less than five (or three) seconds anyway?
It’s a bit like Prince Andrew’s sex appeal: what is the point?

Most
of the cars reviewed on the programme are unaffordable, anyway; I bet more than
90% of people who are glued to the box when the programme is aired, can’t
afford to buy them.

Watching
Top
Gear type programmes is, for me, about as exciting as watching your
nails grow. Tiresome does not even begin to describe it.

Mind
you, I have nothing against blokes who harbour unhealthy interests in cars; you never know what will move one’s rocks. Over the years I have known
people with peculiar habits. At one of my workplaces was a guy who was
borderline obsessed with squid. Another was into German board games. A girl I
used to go out with was interested in French literature.

Indeed
I can empathize with the strong affection people come to invest in things—because
I have unhealthy interests of my own—books—which may seem peculiar to others—,
even though I can’t understand why the objects of their affection come to yield
the influence they do on the besotted: rhinestone jewellery or absinthe; or
cars.

But
I digress. Back to Top Gear—India Special. I did not watch this special edition
aired over Christmas—I am interested in India (it is a fascinating country) but
not interested in cars—which have raised the hackles of Indians. Or, Indian
High commission in England, to be specific.

The
Indian High Commission in London has sent a formal letter of complaint to the
BBC. On the face of it, that is one more country Clarkson and his co-presenters
have managed to offend (Mexico and Albania being other).

It
is interesting, however, that after the programme was aired the BBC received
only 23 complaints. This suggests that the Indian Diaspora in Britain was (a)
not offended; or (b) was offended but did not complain to the BBC; or (c) (I
hope to God this is true—) did not watch the programme.

So
one cannot say that the complaint about Clarkson’s antics on Top
Gear has arisen from the ‘over-sensitive’ minorities in this country,
which, as any Daily Mail reader will tell you, are pampered.

The
complaint has come from the official representative of a country, which allowed
the BBC to film this programme in
that country.

As
per the letter published in the Daily Telegraph, when the producer
of Top
Gear wrote to the Indian High-Commission, requesting for permission to
enter and film in India, the High Commission was given assurance that the
programme would be a ‘light-hearted road trip’ that would focus on the ‘idiosyncrasies
of the cars’ the three presenters would drive, as well as on ‘the country and
scenery’ along the way. The programme was going to involve ‘spontaneous
interaction between the presenters and their environment and people, in an
incidental manner’. The key-ingredients were going to be ‘local charm and
colour within these locations’ and illustration of the local car culture’.

The
formal letter of complaint from the Indian High Commission accuses that the
programme was ‘replete with cheap jibes, tasteless humour, and lacked cultural
sensitivity.’ The letter goes on to accuse that the BBC was ‘clearly in breach
of the agreement’ it ‘had entered into, completely negating’ the High
Commission’s ‘proactive facilitation.’

What
the Indians (or the Indian High Commission, to be specific) seem to be saying
is—there is no kinder way of putting this—the BBC told them lies to get permission
to film in their country; accepted all the help that was offered; and then made
a programme that was contrary to the spirit of the agreement it had entered
into.

I
watched the programme on the BBC i-player that has so offended the sentiments
of the Indian High Commission and (one Raj Dhutta, of Manchester Indian
Association, who described the programme as tasteless).

It
is a long programme: 1 hour and 30 minutes. I managed to watch the first 50
minutes, at which point of time the computer stopped broadcasting, giving the
message, instead, that the band-width was not enough. Which was just as well,
as I was contemplating in my mind what would be more painful: slashing my
wrists or watching the programme.

I
am a bit disappointed with the tone of complaint of the letter sent by the
Indian High Commission. I would have understood if they were offended (I think the letter uses a milder word: 'disappointed') that the
Top
Gear presenters managed to make a programme about such a colourful and
vibrant country as theirs that was so utterly boring.

I
also agree with Raj Dhutta (of Indian Association in Manchester) that the
programme was remarkably crass and tasteless. It was more than tasteless. It
was sad.

The
trouble with the Top Gear, as far as I am concerned, in addition to being about
a boring topic such as cars, is: it is presented by three boring old farts
(with combined age in three figures) who insist on behaving and speaking as if
they were hormonal teenagers.

At
one stage in the programme the three presenters put up a banner on a train which
said ‘Eat British Muffins’. Then when the train carriages are decoupled, the
banner tears and the camera focuses on ‘Eat British Muff’. Honestly. I could
just about have tolerated this level of humour if the presenters were younger
(and fitter). But when it comes from the likes of Clarkson (as handsome as a prize
ox), May (who looks like a tramp) and a midget (will be blown out of the room if you sneezed in his face), it is just pathetic. As you watch the three of
them howling like a simultaneously sexed up and seriously injured dog, when the carriages move, the paunches of two of them wobbling unattractively, all that is missing—you feel—is: shaved heads, biceps
swollen by anabolic steroids, flags of St George tattooed on one arm and of naked women on the other—and lo and behold! You are
looking at perfect English gentlemen.

Since
my computer gave up showing the programme at the fiftieth minute, I was spared
the spectacle of Clarkson taking off his trousers in front of Indian
dignitaries (the photograph in one of the tabloids shows that there was a woman
present as well) and showing them how to use a trouser press. He apparently
joked that he used it to make nan bread. I cannot believe that this was a ‘spontaneous’
interaction the producer had assured the Indian High Commission in London they
would be filming. It was clearly a staged event. Which suggests to me two
things: (1) the Indians were probably given an indication what Clarkson was
going to do. (2) The woman in the crowd was very brave. I mean Clarkson, even when
fully clothed, is not a sight for sore eyes (or sensitive stomachs). His teeth
are enough to scare toddlers, and when he laughs his face comes to hold an uncanny
resemblance to a bullfrog gulping in pain. He has a big face, which, still, is
not big enough to handle his nose adequately. Having to look at his ugly mug, I
would have thought, is punishment enough. Why would you want to be there when
this man, who essentially is a mule combined with an ass combined with a bear,
takes off his trousers, parading his flabby, pasty-white thighs? The woman must have been a glutton for punishment.

There
was another scene in the programme when the three presenters were seen, with another fat (and ugly) bloke (presumably the producer of the programme), on a train from Mumbai to Jaipur, singing songs to the accompaniment of a drum
and cello (which, no doubt, materialised ‘spontaneously’ in the carriage),
generally creating a ruckus and disturbing other passengers, who seemed to
tolerate the antics with bemused tolerance.

When
will these idiots realise that when they behave in this fashion they are not
being quaint; they are not being eccentric; they are just pain in the bum.

When
the presenters were not juvenile, crass, obnoxious (and generally insufferable),
they were behaving like toffee-nosed wankers.

The
level of humour in the programme made the Carry On films—which, let me say this
clearly, are third rate—appear like acme of intellectual sophistication. (As an
aside, I have always struggled to fathom why the Carry On films are considered by
some to be some sort of national treasure. They are not funny in the least;
they are just smutty; the actors couldn’t act; utterly dreadful).

All
of the above are of course my subjective views. It is possible that there are people
out there who found the Top
Gear—India Special
fascinating, funny, and watchable, just in the same way there are those
who find the WWF fighting genuine and thrilling.

There
is an American friend of mine who tells me that he is tired of listening to English colleagues in his company telling him all the time that the Americans do not
get English humour. ‘I can’t seem to get across to these morons,’ he tells me, ‘that
I don’t find their toilet humour funny, which is different from not getting it.’

There
is a thin line between comic use of stereotyping, as the BBC disingenuously
tried to put to the Mexicans after the midget Hammond said offensive things about their culture, and plain boorishness. Bullshit—even when
said in the posh BBC accent—won’t always
baffle the brain.

I
can see why the Indian High Commission was peeved with the BBC and Top Gear. The thing is: when we go to other countries and cultures;
enjoy and take advantage of the hospitalities offered by these cultures in good
faith; and make programmes full of crude and low level humour, we run the risk
of portraying an image of our culture
that does not make a pretty viewing. However, I do not expect that the likes of
the producers of Top Gear, who are so up their own arses that they can
practically drink their own bile, to appreciate this.

Wednesday, 4 January 2012

In the
second section of his most recent, quite possibly his last, non-fiction book, Masque
of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, V.S. Naipaul recounts an
incident. He is in Nigeria and, in the company of his local guide, a Muslim
named Adesina, he is visiting a babalawo
—a soothsayer. On a little table in front of the babalawo are his magic things (Naipaul’s words), amongst which is a
‘sensationally dirty’ school exercise book. After the fee of the consultation
is settled—the soothsayer initially demands a thousand dollars, but Adesina,
‘used to this kind of outrage’ remains calm and beats him down in the end to
something much smaller—Naipaul has to ask the babalawo a question. Naipaul asks, ‘Will my daughter get married?’
(Naipaul does not have any children of his own, but his second wife has a
grown-up daughter from her first marriage). The babalawo is thrown by this question. He says, ‘I thought only black
people have such problems.’ The babalawo is
nevertheless willing to give an opinion. He consults his exercise book,
performs some rituals using cowry shells and two small gourds tied with a piece
of string. Finally he is ready to tell Naipaul the future: ‘The girl,’ declares
the babalawo portentously, ‘is not
going to get married. You have many enemies. To break their spells we will have
to do many rituals. They will cost money, but the girl will get married.’
Everyone in the room is quite excited. Adesina and his brother (both of whom,
despite being Muslims, believe in and have maintained links with the
traditional religion), Naipaul remarks, ‘the babalawo had them all in the palm of his hand.’ Then Naipaul says,
‘But what he [babalawo] has told me
is good. I don’t want the girl to be married.’ Naipaul concludes the incident
with the wry comment: ‘I believe only the reverence of Adesina and others saved
the day.’

The above
is a rare moment of light relief in an otherwise doleful book.

V.S.
Naipaul, the recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a man who has
reinvented himself in a literary career spanning more than five decades during
which he has produced approximately thirty works of fiction and
non-fiction. He started off with novels.
His early novels were brilliant works of satirical comedies with the Caribbean
islands (where he was born and bred) as the backdrop. The two works from this
period which stand out, for me, are Miguel Street and The
House forMister Biswas. Naipaul’s later fictional work became more
sombre, assumed, for want of better phrase, more gravitas, and, as years went
by, the humour—so fresh and evident in his early novels—vanished completely.
You get a flavour of things to come in his 1967 novel Mimic Men, which, in
parts, still has comic moments. The grave, almost mythical, tone of his fiction
is really set from A Flag on the Island (which won the 1971 Booker Prize) onwards.
The three novels from this period which I think are outstanding are (in
chronological order): A Bend in the River, An
Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. A
Bend in the River is perhaps my most favourite Naipaul novel, but A Way
in the World is extraordinary, too. It is not a conventional novel at
all; rather it is a complex interweaving of personal memories, stories of
possibly real life characters, and historical metafiction: it is, quite simply,
awesome.

Naipaul did
not build his reputation solely on fiction, though. Had Naipaul restricted
himself only to writing fiction, he would still have earned his place in the
annals of world literature. I do not know what the critics would have made of
his later fiction, but certainly his early fiction would have been
acknowledged—perhaps still is—as fiction which opened gates for talented
Commonwealth Writers (Salman Russhdie, Rohinton Mistry, Caryl Philips
etcetera).

However,
Naipaul did not write only fiction. From 1960s onwards, he began to travel. He
travelled to different corners of the European Empires. The fruits of his
travels were a kind of reportage books with a difference. Naipaul has written a trilogy of books on
India, the country of his ancestors; on South Americas; the Caribbean; and two
books of astonishing prescience from his travels in the Islamic countries. In
these books Naipaul evolved a style that was adopted by other writers, most
notably Paul Theroux and Shiva Naipaul (Naipaul’s younger brother who died of a
heart attack when he was only forty, and is a largely forgotten name these
days). These travel writings—they are not typical travelogues, as already
mentioned—established Naipaul’s reputation as a contrarian writer, who was not
afraid to express views that were considered as ‘politically incorrect’. (Add
to this Naipaul’s recent penchant for making seemingly outrageous statements in
his interviews, which generate a lot of ill-feeling towards him—although he
seems not to care, revel, even, in this persona (should we call it a
masque?)—and you get an idea why Sir Vidia has become a controversial character
in British literary scene.) In these peregrinations Naipaul casts himself as an
‘outsider’. He has no allegiance to anyone or anything except truth, or what he
sees as truth. He is not wedded to any ideology or philosophy and tells it as
he sees it. As far as possible he lays out for the reader what he sees or
discusses (with others) without any sensor (as it were); on the rare occasions
when he passes a judgment (or comment) he appears acutely aware of the
limitations—prejudices if you may—of his vision. It is this, together with the
quality of his writing, that has won Naipaul his fans (probably not many)
amongst whom I include myself.

The Masque of Africa with its somewhat imprecise
subtitle—the Glimpses of African Beliefs—is Naipaul’s first work of
non-fiction in over a decade. In it he returns to the continent he first
visited 44 years ago and which provided a backdrop to some of his fiction.
Starting with Uganda—where he spent several months as a writer in residence at
the Makerere University in Kampala (a version of which he used some years later
in A
Bend in the River—the country, not the university)—Naipaul visits five
more African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa.

Naipaul is
mainly interested in finding out about the traditional religions of Africa, the
older, animistic beliefs and practices that were prevalent in the continent
before the two great religions of the world—Christianity and Islam—arrived
and asserted themselves—imposed, even,—on
the population. Naipaul wants to know, bearing in mind the theme of his travel,
what has happened to the traditional religions of Africa.

The theme
is not new. It has been examined—in particular the clash between the older and
the more modern (for want of better phrase) religions and the apparently
unbridgeable differences between their doctrines and explanatory models—in
fiction before: the superb Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
and almost equally remarkable Purple Hibiscus (Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie). What we get in The Masque of Africa is
the non-fiction version, or Naipaul’s version of it.

Naipaul famously said
once, ‘An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never
lies: it reveals the writer totally.’ By his own yardstick, The
Masque of Africa lends itself vulnerable to the charge of Naipaul
distorting or not reporting faithfully— either because his memory has played
tricks with him or because what he has heard does not fit into his
pre-conceived notion about Africa—what he hears in his meetings with the
Africans. Indeed in his review of the book William Boyd (a favourite writer of mine;
he writes entertaining novels, but let’s face it—he is never going to write
anything that would make you pause and think and examine your conceptions)
brazenly says that the ‘transcribed monologues’ seemed ‘bogus’ to him. That is
an astonishing accusation to hurl at a writer renowned for his searing honesty.
Boyd gives some bogus sounding (to me) explanations why he doubts the veracity of
Naipaul’s conversations with the Africans:
it would appear that Boyd’s view of Naipaul’s travel writing is changed
forever by what he calls the French Effect (referring to warts and all
‘authorized’ biography of Naipaul by Patrick French, never mind that both
Naipaul and his second wife have since expressed bitterness and reservations
about the biography). At the end of the day these are subjective impressions
which cannot be explained away rationally. For what it is worth none of the
conversations with the various people Naipaul meets in the course of his
travels seemed inauthentic to me. However, it would be fair to say that some of
the conversations make uncomfortable reading. Here is an extract of the
conversation between Naipaul and a distinguished academic, a former dean of the
University of Gabon, a man of mixed ancestry (French father and African mother)
but, who, Naipaul comments, ‘like many people of mixed ancestry, appeared to be
embracing the African side of his inheritance.’ This man, a lawyer by
profession, who thinks of himself as a political scientist and teaches
political anthropology at the University of Gabon, is also a passionate
believer in the traditional religion of Gabon and has, as Naipaul puts it,
‘come to a poetic understanding of the place of forest in the Gabonese mind.’
The lawyer gives Naipaul examples of his encounters with the supernatural. When
Naipaul asks him whether he can define the religion of forest more closely, he
replies, ‘in a precise, academic way’:

‘We cannot call it a religion. It is a set of
beliefs. We don’t pray to God because in our understanding God is not
accessible to humans. It [he meant the idea of God] has many other problems and
has no time for humans.’

Does this
sound ‘bogus’? How about the following? After describing to Naipaul the levels
of ‘organic world’, the lawyer explains the ‘initiation ceremony’:

‘You remain afraid. Initiation and ritual only
give you a path through the forest. You are not protected against others, women
especially. Women are very important in the society. They are the real power. A
woman may not exercise power, but she gives it to her son. We are a matrilineal
society, and women give life. This country was not made for men. Women’s bodies
are stronger, and so they are witches. There are many ritual sacrifices where
the eyes are removed and tongues torn out of living victims. Every day there is
a ritual sacrifice. White skin is very prized here, and for that reason I
cannot let my light-skinned children out in the evening.’

Naipaul
then asks the lawyer the importance of the tongue and the lawyer replies that
‘they’ remove the tongue to get energy. When Naipaul asks him what he thinks
about it, the lawyer replies, ‘There is no name. It is too shocking.’ Then, for
the first time in this entire piece, Naipaul gives the reader a glimpse of what
he thinks, his judgment as it were:
‘It was a relief to hear him say that. He had spoken of ‘energy’ in such a
positive way I thought he might have been more accepting.’

The format of The
Masque of Africa is similar to Naipaul’s earlier travel writings, a
genre that he created. He travels to countries; he visits places in these
countries and observes; and he talks and listens. He meets people and asks them
questions. You get the impression by the very nature of these encounters that
they are not random; that the people Naipaul meets are ‘recruited’ by his contacts
in the country he is visiting because they are ‘interesting’. Almost everyone
Naipaul meets during his African travels and whose conversations he records for
the reader is a well educated African occupying a high position or holding down
a white collar job, who has interesting things to say about Africa and its old
religion.

And what does Naipaul
find when he speaks to these selected individuals? He discovers that underneath
the patina of Christianity and Islam, the old, traditional religion lives on.
Some of these individuals are comfortable with it and in their minds have dual
identities without any cognitive dissonance, such as some of the Nigerians
Naipaul meets, who consider themselves Catholic Christians belonging to the
Yoruba tribe and have no hesitation in performing traditional rites not
approved by ‘modern’ religions. Some others, like Nicole, the lady police
body-guard Naipaul is provided with in Gabon, have rejected the old religion
totally and become staunch Christians. In Gabon Naipaul, with Nicole, visits an
isolated establishment in the village of Lope, deep in the forest, where the
tribal chief has promised to show him the siren of the river—a white woman. As
it happens Naipaul does not avail himself of this offer as he is feeling too tired.
This is what Naipaul says:

‘She [Nicole] was Christian, but she had the old Gabonese
anxiety about water, an inauspicious element. The talk about the white sirens
at the bottom of the river wouldn’t have pleased her at all; and she had been
praying and praying, against hope for much of the time, that the river trip
wouldn’t take place. Now, miraculously, her prayers have been answered, giving
her, I suppose, yet another proof of the power of the prayer.’

In Libreville, where
Naipaul is invited to witness an initiation ceremony—a performance, as Naipaul
is aware, for the benefit for the visitors, arranged by a Frenchman who has
married a Gabonese woman—Nicole accompanies Naipaul. But she refuses to go to
the ceremony. Naipaul comments:

‘She was a Christian and wanted no part of
this spirit talk. The drumming and chanting might have been done only for
tourists, but it agitated her. Working her lips but not speaking loudly, she
was saying ‘Hail Mary’ again and again, speaking her Christian charm against
whatever charms were in play here, and unwittingly paying tribute to the power
of African spirits.’

Not all Africans
Naipaul meets are as won over as Nicole is by Christianity. In Uganda he meets
an educated middle class woman who is raised as a Christian. Naipaul describes
her as ‘someone overtly Christian but with a love for her roots’. This woman
equates the traditional African religion with the African culture. Says she:

‘Modernity wants us to sweep our culture
away, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict between
Christianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there was a
drought, or it was prolonged, all the elders got together and made sacrifices,
and it would rain while they were at it. My grandmother told me this. But the
missionaries called it devil worship. Culture does not die—today it is called
witchcraft. My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in a
special way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over their grave, to
protect and shade them. Every year my grandmother went there to tend the shed,
feed the grave, and sing and dance there. When she became a Pentecostal she had
to stop that, as it was not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was so
afraid that the twins would come and kill her living children. I talk to myself
so as not to get confused. To me it is all about belief and what treats you
well. In traditional religion it was not about money. It was a communal spirit
and people come together for common cause like the drought.’

And, Naipaul
concludes:

‘Gradually from the tragedies . . . and
from conversations with good people, the visitor arrives at the unsettling idea
of a poor country, still vulnerable—in its people, living on their nerves, and
even its landscape, which might be despoiled—after forty years of civil
conflict, still waiting for an upheaval which may solve nothing.’

Depressing? Yes.
Far-fetched? I am not sure. Racist? Definitely not.

Although Naipaul does
not directly say this, the impression you are left with—the impression Naipaul
wants you to be left with—is that on the whole ‘outside’ religions such as
Christianity, foisted upon the Africans by a bunch of fanatical
missionaries—exemplified by ‘Doctor’ Schweitzer (who is briefly mentioned)—,
who had no love or respect for the old African beliefs, were inimical to the
African culture. The Africans were told, as the Christianity sought to impose
its intellectual superiority, that their traditional beliefs and ideas about
nature and divinity were mere superstitions, of low value. The Africans were
compelled, almost, to feel ashamed of their heritage which was dismissed as
mere mumbo-jumbo (the book traces the origin of this word and links it to an
ancient African (Nigerian) custom). It was cultural imperialism of the worst
kind, and its effect was calamitous. The closest Naipaul comes to voicing this
is to imply that if left to its own traditional beliefs Africa ‘might have
arrived at its own more valuable synthesis of old and new’. It is a compelling
argument, all the more so because Naipaul does not actually make it; he leaves
it to the reader to figure it out.

For the
best part Naipaul refrains scrupulously from making any value judgments. Occasionally,
though, the mask slips; and what is revealed is weary exasperation. For
example, in Ivory Coast, the land of ivory, but ‘now without the elephants that
by their death provided the ivory of their tusks’, he describes two ‘cruel’
elephant monuments: one of a female elephants with her calf (elephants, Naipaul
informs, is food in this part of Africa), and a tall, awkward obelisk composed
(Naipaul says, ‘wickedly’) of elephant tusks alone. In the same section, towards the end, there
is a detailed description of how bats are caught and boiled before they are
eaten in the Ivory Coast. These fruit bats or their fleas, the reader is
informed, are carriers of the deadly Ebola virus. ‘The victims bleed helplessly
till they die. No one knows for sure how the virus jumps from bat to man; but a
good guess is that the virus is transmitted by the eating of the bat.’ Naipaul
ends the section with a prognostication that is almost Biblical:

‘So the darkening of Abidjan [capital of Ivory Coast] sky at dusk was not only part of the visual
drama of West Africa: it was like a plague waiting to fall on the men below.’

In the
first country he visits, Uganda, Naipaul talks about a chimpanzee sanctuary set
on one of the islands of Lake Victoria: forty two animals, he informs, whose
parents and animals had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are ‘great
relishers of what they call as bush meat’ and—Naipaulian acerbity, this—‘given
guns and left to themselves would easily eat their way through the continent’s
wildlife.’

Naipaul is
similarly unsparing when it comes to looking at (and presenting to the reader)
his own instincts and impulses; and they, too, at times, make uncomfortable
reading. In Gabon, Naipaul comes to know about the Pigmies, ‘the small
people’—‘the first inhabitants of the forest’—, from the local Africans,
although he never actually meets one.
After listening at length to Claudine, one of his guides in Gabon, this
is how Naipaul records his feelings:

‘Even with Claudine’s knowledge of the pigmy
ways, and her love for them, it was hard to arrive at a human understanding of
the pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren’t.’

This need
not appear as chilling (or racist) as it did to some reviewers. What Naipaul
seems to be saying here is that he found it very difficult to understand how it
might be to be a pigmy, so different (or alien) he found their ways from his.
He is acknowledging a deficiency. In any case, not all the Gabonese Africans
seem to have the love for the ‘first inhabitants of the forest’. Naipaul meets
a Gabonese tribal chief and traditional healer of the Fang tribe (appointed by
the Gabonese government). This man, who was baptized and confirmed, but decided
that ‘the traditional religion was strong in him’, tells Naipaul how he was
trained in the religious rituals of the tribe. This is what he says:

‘My grandfather had gone south on an old
walking road and he had captured two pigmies. He owned them. The pigmies have
the power and we keep them just like you keep pets. You can do anything you
like with your pet, but there is something in the pet that you don’t have. We
kept them and we pitied them. . .’

While the
main theme of these travels, as suggested in the title, is to understand—or try
to understand—the traditional African beliefs, there are two parallel streams
that run throughout the length of the book.

The first
is Naipaul’s affection towards animals, in particular domestic pets such as
cats and dogs. This is the only time the otherwise detached, at times almost
haughty, Naipaul comes closest to betraying his emotions. And Africa provides
him with unending supply of starving kittens and dogs with skin conditions.
Whenever possible Naipaul gives them milk or feeds them; on many occasions,
however, he is a helpless observer to their misery. It is only when he is describing the plight
of these animals that Naipaul’s prose appears to lose its cool, as in the
following paragraph:

‘The land is full of cruelty which is hard for
the visitor to bear. From the desert countries to the north long-horned cattle
are sent for slaughter here in big, ramshackle trucks, cargoes of misery that
bump along the patched and at times defective autoroutes to Abidjan, to the
extensive abattoir area near the docks. And there in trampled and vile black
earth these noble creatures, still with dignity, await their destiny in the
smell of death, with sometimes a calf, all alone, without a mother, finding
comfort of sort in sleep, a little brown circle on the dirty ground, together
with the beautiful goats and sheep assembled for killing. The ground around d
the abattoir goes on and on. When sights like these meet the eyes of the simple
people every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.’

A tad over
the top, perhaps, towards the end, but heartfelt; it seems almost as if that
Naipaul reserves such empathy as he has for the animals and has nothing left
for the humans.

The second
stream is Naipaul’s anxieties about money. He comes across as a miser. In his
travels he visits a number of shrines, tombs, witchdoctors, and soothsayers in
different countries. And they all want money or gifts, which Naipaul is most
reluctant to give them. In almost every meeting with the medicine-men and
tribal chiefs he is inwardly calculating and agitating about how much it is
going to cost him, worried that he might be ripped off. And the funny thing is
he does not pay for anything on even a single occasion; he makes his African
guides pay the money every time. In one visit to a tribal chief in Ghana,
Naipaul is expected to present the chief with a bottle of schnapps (the only
alcoholic drink the chief is allowed to accept) which would then be offered as
libation to the ancestors. Naipaul does not take with him schnapps—which, you
think, wouldn’t have emptied his bank account—, and notes nonchalantly that it
was a good thing that his African guide had brought with him the liquor bottle.
I didn’t quite know what to make of this (other than that it fit the
description of Naipaul as skinflint in Paul Theroux’s memoir, Sir
Vidia’s Shadow). It is quite funny, though I am not sure that it is
intentional.

With a few
exceptions—Ghana and South Africa—Naipaul generally steers clear of the
political contexts of the countries he visits. I do not think it is an
oversight on part of the great man, and absence of political context does not
detract a jot from the enjoyment the reader derives from the book. The
Masque of Africa is an attempt to examine the cultural, traditional
beliefs of the African countries Naipaul visited and the extent to which these
beliefs, subterranean under the Christian and Muslim dogmas, guide the daily
lives of inhabitants; it is not a chronicle of the political upheavals in these
countries, which, in any case, are too many (and too frequent, in some cases)
to have been done justice to in this book.

Naipaul is
a keen and acute observer. Nothing escapes him. This is his strength, as in his
meetings with the former military leader of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, and the
former wife of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela. Naipaul is in his elements when
he describes these meetings. At other times, though, he strikes a slightly
shrill note in his descriptions of poverty and dirt (which seem to be
everywhere he goes); it tends to get a tad wearisome after a while. That is not
to say however that what he has written is untrue. In one of the countries he
visits Naipaul is appalled by what he sees: the roads are in disrepair; garbage
litters the sides of the road, uncollected; trim bungalows are replaced by
ugly, corrugated shacks— themselves in dilapidated states; and the green hills
he remembered so well have all but disappeared. He writes simply:

‘It seemed to me I was in a place where a
calamity had occurred.’

The country
is Uganda which saw its population, in the forty years since Naipaul first
visited it, explode from 5 million in the 1960s to 30 million in the first
decade of 21st century, despite decades of civil war and AIDS
epidemic, and which, lest we forget, was not without its own brand of racism
when, during the tyrannical reign of Idi Amin, it persecuted and ultimately
drove away tens of thousands of Asians who had lived peacefully in that country
for generations, for no other reason than they were of a different race.

Over the
years Naipaul has been accused of many things by his detractors: misanthropy,
misogyny, cruelty, racism and, following the publication of The
Masque of Africa, of Fascism (by Robert Harris who earns his living by
writing racy thrillers which, while they might be made into F grade Hollywood
films and fetch him a packet, would not require, it would be safe to assume, to
exercise more than 10% of the neurones of an averagely intelligent person). The
viciousness of the attacks on Naipaul has reached a higher decibel since he was
awarded the Nobel. I have to say that none from the usual list of accusations
thrown at Naipaul was evident to me in Masque of Africa, which—give or take
an odd loose sentence—is an honest attempt by a non-believer (ancient or modern
religions) to arrive at a humane understanding of the centuries-old African
beliefs.

The Masque of Africa is an outsider’s view of the
African countries he visits. The outsider does not claim to have special
knowledge of the African countries; he does not even claim to have special
affection for these countries; neither does he have any pre-conceptions; he is a
visitor who owes allegiance to no one and nothing save his artistic integrity.
He sees, he notes, and he tells what he sees. If that makes some of us
uncomfortable, that is of no concern to him.

And when
the observer is the greatest living prose writer of our times the result is a
dazzling spectacle of melancholic beauty.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.